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Women finally receive call-up to football's top team

Moya Dodd

Former Matilda Moya Dodd has been nominated by Asia as its candidate in the coming FIFA election for the position of global women's football representative. Here she explains why.

Somewhere in the heavens - some time last century or perhaps the one before - the gods decided on an interesting experiment. One half of the population would be given unlimited access to football fields, equipment, coaches, medicos and broadcast revenues - while the other half would not.

And so the systematic exclusion of women in football began. The Dutch banned women's football in 1896, and the English in 1921 after 52,000 fans turned up at Goodison Park, in Liverpool, to watch a women's game. The Germans, Brazilians and others imposed similar bans, sending the game into decades of exile.

In 1988, FIFA finally organised a women's world tournament. Australia was invited, and I was thrilled to be selected. Our first opponents were Brazil. We learnt what it meant to have four of the best strikers in the world attacking us in a 4-2-4 formation. And we amazed ourselves by beating them 1-0.

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That was the 1980s, an era when we paid our own airfares to represent our state and country, and our national body's sole, overworked employee once asked us to sew the coat of arms onto our own tracksuits. I arrived quite by accident in the Matildas, never having played in an under-age team or attended a girls' skills clinic - because there were none. Plenty of knockers thought we were circus freaks for wanting to play at all.

And now, less than 25 years after that first FIFA match, the game's steep trajectory has brought us international matches of extraordinary quality in packed stadiums at World Cup and Olympics tournaments. We saw incredible athleticism in our just-completed W-League finals, with local stars such as Kyah Simon, Sammy Kerr and Caitlin Foord shown live on television with thousands of chanting fans, many overlapping their support with their club's A-League team. And every winter weekend, more than 100,000 Australian women and girls don their boots or grab their whistle and join in.

Is it any wonder that the most-played, most-watched game on the planet is rapidly engaging its other half? In a few decades, we've gone from illicit to incredible.

Yet still, in this country and in every other, being born female means facing a profoundly tilted playing field. In many countries, women and girls cannot play in organised competitions at all. If they can, it is on vastly inferior terms to their male counterparts.

Most football bodies have few, if any, women on their governing boards or in other key decision-making roles. And only a handful of the world's elite females can hope to earn a professional living.

In 35 years of playing football, I've personally experienced all of these disadvantages. Despite that, football has given to me immeasurably. It's taught me teamwork, resilience and hard work. It's brought me wonderful people I would never have met otherwise. And it's given me health, friendships, thrills and laughs like nothing else. For all that, I'm better adjusted, more productive and more fulfilled than I could ever have been in a life without football.

That's why it's so significant that FIFA is now creating a place on its executive committee for a woman. Women have shown - emphatically - that they can play. Now women must also help govern and influence. There is a crying need to advocate for tens of millions of female players, referees and coaches, and millions more who will join in.

Opportunities abound for the women's game to be part of a global football renewal. The lifting last year of the ban on women playing football while wearing a hijab was a tangible symbol of accessibility and inclusion, of how football can be a forum for cultural exchange rather than conflict.

The passion and purity on display in the most recent World Cup and Olympics finals between Japan and the US reminded the football world of the joyous, spirited game that we first fell in love with. And the irreversible rise in female participation in society's decision-making - in government, business and politics - is steadily making its way into the sporting arena.

I believe that all societies and institutions are better, stronger and fairer when women fully participate. That's why I feel very fortunate to be nominated as Asia's candidate for the election in May of a women's football representative on the FIFA committee. If successful, I'll be joining 24 men at FIFA's top table.

Women's football - so long held back as if it were the control group in some cosmic experiment - has arrived. It's a game whose time has come. And I cannot imagine a more delightful or emphatic way to promote full participation in our world than by developing women's place in the game that the world loves most.

Moya Dodd is a partner at Gilbert+Tobin Lawyers, vice-president of the Asian Football Confederation, a director of Football Federation Australia and a member of FIFA's legal committee. She played for the Matildas from 1986 to 1995.

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